@hichris123 I thought about that, that was why I suggested breaking the link rather than hiding the content all together.
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apaul34208Jul 8 '14 at 23:37

Is it ok? I don't see what it hurts. Is it worth the trouble? I would say not unless you see one that the mods hadn't gotten to quickly enough. If you want to be safe then you could always add a comment deterring users from following the link.
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codeMagicJul 9 '14 at 0:03

11

Spam with edit history takes me an order of magnitude longer to validate.
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Flexo♦Jul 9 '14 at 18:16

great question... might not have thought about this otherwise.
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Mike MJul 10 '14 at 14:08

1 Answer
1

The best way to make spam ineffective is to delete it quickly! The single best thing you can do when you see spam is flag it:

Just about anything else you can do is at best a waste of your time and effort, unless it somehow leads directly to more folks flagging the post as spam. Editing in particular can actually be counter-productive, both by making the spam less obvious to other flaggers and by allowing folks to roll back flags added since the edit.

Thinking you're gonna discourage future spam by breaking the links is, I'm afraid, rather naive; best we can tell, most spam is very nearly free to whoever is behind it - indeed, a tremendous amount is blocked automatically and never seen by anyone, much less followed... Yet the cost to generate it is apparently so low that this doesn't matter, meaning any extra time you spend on it is time wasted.

Perhaps the system could be updated to automatically "break" links in posts flagged as spam (and perhaps display a notice to that effect) until the moderators have a chance to address it. This accomplishes @apaul34208's goal of reducing traffic to spam sites a bit more quickly without reducing the effectiveness of the moderation system.
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Lars KemmannJul 9 '14 at 22:27

5

@LarsKemmann rather than break it I would suggest a pop up saying Warning, this post was flagged as spam. Do you wish to proceed? [Y/N]
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Admiral Adama Jul 9 '14 at 22:39

2

@AdmiralAdama You should put that as a feature request :) Although some spam is done to drive up their search engine rankings by making their site look more reputable (because a big site like StackOverflow is linking to it) so it wouldn't help in that case.
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Tim BJul 10 '14 at 13:39

I think the idea of the popup from @AdmiralAdama is great... would also encourage the clicker to think about flagging (well, would actually bias them to do so, but this might be desirable if we are biased against spam)
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Mike MJul 10 '14 at 14:10